I'm having boolean flushes and unnatural thoughts about tight coupling. I used to think curry was a type of food but not any more. Digital dysphoria - meditations on not being completely human any more. (For a given definition of 'human').

Back in 2001 I was cautioning against treating all XML transformation tasks as fodder for XSLT. I have continued to do so ever since.XSLT is plain awful at a whole class of XML transformation problems and has some serious cost-of-ownership issues (hint - read some XSLT you wrote last year. Do you get that Voynich manuscript effect?).Also, XSLT's 'brick walls' are actually made of ten foot thick, five mile high, sheets of titanium alloy. When you hit one you stay hit.XSLT is best treated as an appurtenance in your core XML transformational toolkit which should have a fully fledged programming language like Python on top.Martin Fowler lists some sane reasons why he is moving away from XSLT.

Nokia announce an adventure game for the Nokia Smartphone. I can see it now. The screen goes blank, the text scrolls...

You are in a scaler context, surrounded by blessed variables. Do you wish to (a) execute a sublimely presented McCarthy conditional or (b) run and hide in the two-to-the-n-minus-one backslashes escaping the newline in the regular expression?

OASIS are holding a symposium on reliable infrastructures for XML. There is an interoperability nightmare in that space right now and it is really getting to be a drag. Who would have thought that literally decades after the fundamentals of reliable messaging were trashed out, we would still be in this position?